A protester shows his support for a petition to give Johnson County voters a chance to tell county officials how they feel about high-volume oil and gas drilling at the Illinois state capitol in Springfield last week. (Seth Perlman, Associated Press)

By Jennifer DigginsGuest Commentary

In early November, voters in seven communities in Colorado and Ohio were asked to ban hydraulic fracturing. A ban succeeded in five out of seven communities.

Out-of-state opposition groups misled voters to believe fracking contaminates water aquifers, increases air pollution and sacrifices public health. The outcome is a wake-up call for any American who values affordable energy, energy security and a cleaner environment.

If you think about the question from an objective and scientific standpoint, these bans never should have been approved. Scientific review and state and federal regulators have found shale gas production to be safe. Even Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) administrator Gina McCarthy said, “there’s nothing inherently dangerous in fracking.”

Energy Secretary Ernest Moniz has reiterated that sentiment, stating, “I still have not seen any evidence of fracking per se contaminating groundwater.”Read more…

A worker uses hand signals to communicate with a co-worker over the sound of massive pumps at an Encana Oil & Gas (USA) Inc. hydraulic fracturing and extraction site, outside Rifle, in western Colorado, in March 2013. (Brennan Linsley, Associated Press)

By Diane BanningGuest Commentary

On Nov. 5, in the few minutes it takes to punch a ballot, the residents of several Northern Colorado cities will decide whether to place the livelihoods of more than 100,000 oil and gas workers, and those of their families, in jeopardy. My family is one of them. I am a private person, but with my family’s future at stake, I must speak out.

I started working in oil and gas 25 years ago. But when the industry struggled in 1999, I lost my job. Fortunately, I could fall back on my spouse’s income and focus on raising our two young daughters.

But six years ago, things changed dramatically and my life was in crisis. I became a single mother to two teenage girls. I was deep in debt without health insurance. I needed to find a good job, and quickly. I was terrified. Despite my years away from the workforce, an oil and gas company hired me. I began to climb out of debt and save for college for my daughters.

A small crowd attended a concert and rally against hydraulic fracturing in Denver’s Civic Center Park in October 2012. The controversial method of extracting gas and petroleum is more commonly known as fracking. The event drew celebrities such as actressed Darryl Hannah and Mariel Hemingway and musician Jakob Dylan. (Karl Gehring, The Denver Post)

By Kaye Fissinger and Sam SchabackerGuest Commentary

If Gov. John Hickenlooper wants to use this weekend’s Democratic Governors Association meeting in Aspen to prove his merit as a contender for his party’s nomination in the 2016 presidential election, he may want to follow a simple piece of advice: Good governors don’t frack their people.

The groundswell of citizens across both Colorado and the country speaking out against fracking (hydraulic fracturing and all the hazardous activities it entails, including wastewater disposal and other unconventional drilling techniques) clearly indicates that it will be a deciding issue in the race for the White House.

From coast-to-coast, communities big and small have organized to protect their health, safety and property from fracking by banning this dangerous, irresponsible practice. Growing scientific evidence demonstrates that fracking diminishes property values, endangers health and safety, consumes billions of gallons of water, causes earthquakes and exacerbates climate change.Read more…

A small crowd attended a concert and rally against fracking in Denver’s Civic Center Park in October 2012. (Karl Gehring, The Denver Post)

By Xiuhtezcatl MartinezGuest Commentary

I am a 13-year-old boy from the Aztec tradition and I have doing environmental activism since a young age. My first public speaking engagement was seven years ago, at a local climate change rally. I began speaking out on issues that are directly going to determine the kind of world we the youth are going to be left with, because I started learning facts about our environmental and climate crises.

I had been giving presentations in schools on these issues for the last several years when I learned about fracking and started uncovering the disastrous effects it was having on our health, the water, the air, and our community. I did hours of research, and reviewed many many studies about the direct hidden impacts of fracking in our community. So I decided I wanted to educate my peers on fracking by giving a multimedia presentation called “The Inconvenient Proof.”

I was invited to do a fracking presentation for two classes of about 200 middle school kids total in Evergreen. The students were all very excited and participated by asking questions and joining us on a song called “What the Frack.”Read more…

Americans everywhere have grown to rely on all the wonderful things energy provides them. From powering our laptops and cell phones to keeping us cool in the summertime, we love what energy does for us. It’s a fact that fossil fuels — our dominant energy supplier — make our lives better.

Unfortunately, too many Americans are unaware of how our energy is produced, and don’t think about how electricity arrived at their light switch or the wall outlet. This disconnect created between producers and consumers has led to a lack of basic information about the risks and benefits of energy production. Broadening that disconnect are false accusations and misleading information about how oil and natural gas is produced. Those with radical views often gain attention through sensational claims and dominate the public dialogue. Admittedly, the oil and natural gas industry needs to do a better job explaining the process and engaging the public.

Knowing that, Western Energy Alliance launched a comprehensive public opinion research study to better understand what Americans voters think about our industry, the products we produce and how we produce them. Our objectives were rather straight forward as we hired a polling firm to survey 1,000 voters to find out what they know about energy development and regulations currently in place to protect their health and safety. With the accusations lobbed at our industry nearly every day, the positive support we found surprised even us.Read more…

The state legislative session has ended, with oil and gas drilling impacts on our communities still largely unaddressed — in no small part due to the active resistance of Gov. John Hickenlooper’s administration. Even more concerning, the Governor continues to actively undermine the efforts of local governments to respond to the growing citizen outcry against fracking and other industrial activities in their neighborhoods.

For example, last year the governor sued the city of Longmont, where I was city manager for 19 years, for adopting local oil and gas rules to protect its citizens. While I appreciate Gov. Hickenlooper’s characterization of the lawsuit as “a last resort,” I want to explain why Longmont’s rules are legal and make good common sense.

Longmont didn’t take the task of adopting new oil and gas rules lightly. The City Council acted because state rules under the Colorado Oil and Gas Conservation Commission (COGCC) were insufficient to protect our community. The council carefully crafted an ordinance that would safeguard the health and welfare of Longmont citizens and promote industry accountability and responsibility. Working with its most active oil and gas company, the city negotiated an operator agreement that went beyond COGCC requirements. Notably, while the governor sued Longmont for its new rules, the local oil and gas operator did not.

After serving eight years on the Gunnison County Planning Commission, the last three as chair, I retired this year. In those years, we reviewed dozens of natural gas wells and associated operations under local county regulations. On many of the approved wells, we added conditions we felt necessary to protect the public health and safety, especially where there was potential for contamination of our streams. Where COGCC rules didn’t go far enough to protect us, local government had to step up.

Why aren’t the extensive regulations that already exist under the COGCC rules enough? In many cases they absolutely are, but we are a very diverse state. Rural areas on the Plains have developed large gas fields with thousands of wells, where accidents and spills have been contained with little consequence. On the other hand, leaks into the headwater streams and rivers of mountain communities pose entirely different risks that could pollute water for thousands. And I find it difficult to imagine the potential dangers putting the same operations in the midst of a densely populated city would pose.

Occasionally a jurisdiction finds it necessary to step forward on behalf of its citizens, because it is the right thing to do, as the cities of Longmont and Fort Collins have done by proposing bans on fracking. It is hard to believe that the state’s reaction is to smack them down. The truth is that this is a dirty and dangerous business, with literally thousands of accidents and spills occurring every year. Most gas well and fracking operations are done without serious incident, but many are not — accidents do happen and the frequency at which they happen increases as the industry expands. Read more…

Comments Off on Making a case for local oil and gas regulation in Colorado

The obnoxious self-righteousness of some anti-fracking activists only seems to be growing. In Boulder on Tuesday, they jeered a representative of Encana Oil and Gas and then harassed her as she walked back to her car.

Let’s have 9News reporter Todd Walker set the scene. “Wendy Wiedenbeck had asked for a security escort from the building and back to her car following testimony,” he said, “and she needed it. A group of several fracking opponents surrounded and followed her for several blocks shouting at her.”

And it’s not only energy officials they harass. Gov. John Hickenlooper had to make his way through a surly group of protesters in Longmont a few weeks ago, although they weren’t quite as nasty as the activists who followed Wiedenbeck seemed to be.

To get a sense of how over-the-top and utterly divorced from reality these activists can be – and a few appear on the verge of sounding and acting more like fascist thugs, actually – consider the words of fracking foe Jeff Thompson, as quoted in the Daily Camera.

Thompson, the Camera said, “told commissioners later during the hearing that the proposed county regulations ‘are just a big fraud, just a big farce.’

“Thompson compared Boulder County officials’ stated position — that they’ll adopt the strictest local drilling rules possible under Colorado law — to what it would have been like if Nazi Adolf Eichmann had said: ‘I did everything I could within the law to protect the Jews.'”

This isn’t just obnoxious rhetoric. It’s obscene. And the Boulder County commissioners, to their shame, permitted these clowns to disrupt and delay the start of the meeting for a full half hour.

You mean film stars Darryl Hannah and Mariel Hemingway managed to draw all of 200 people Tuesday to Denver’s Civic Center to protest hydraulic fracturing? Why, you could probably get 200 people out to protest fluoridated water.

Still, the protest was instructive in one respect. As The Denver Post reported, “speaking to the crowd Tuesday, Sam Schabacker, an organizer with Food and Water Watch, said, ‘Fracking has no place in Colorado.'”

Notice: No place. He doesn’t want it regulated more rigorously. He wants it banned — and, since the vast majority of wells are now fracked, with it would go much of the oil and gas industry in Colorado.

But look on the bright side: Maybe without oil and gas we wouldn’t have to endure so many energy intensive visits from Hollywood activists.

Comments Off on Sure, let’s ban fracking – and prosperity too while we’re at it

One of Gov. John Hickenlooper‘s appealing traits is his apparent conviction that people tend to be reasonable if given the facts. We’ll see if he’s right to feel this way in the case of hydraulic fracturing for oil and natural gas, but I very much doubt it.

Hickenlooper recently gave marching orders to the Colorado
Oil and Gas Conservation Commission to develop rules requiring disclosure of chemicals used in fracking – a source of bitter controversy between the industry and fracking opponents in recent years.

“Everyone in this room understands that hydraulic fracturing
doesn’t connect to groundwater, that it’s almost inconceivable that
groundwater will be contaminated,” Hickenlooper told the Colorado
Oil & Gas Association earlier this week. “But the industry needs to be transparent. It needs to demonstrate, beyond a doubt, that this doesn’t happen.”

Vincent Carroll is The Denver Post's editorial page editor. He has been writing commentary on politics and public policy in Colorado since 1982 and was originally with the Rocky Mountain News, where he was also editor of the editorial pages until that newspaper gave up the ghost in 2009.

Guidelines: The Post welcomes letters up to 150 words on topics of general interest. Letters must include full name, home address, day and evening phone numbers, and may be edited for length, grammar and accuracy.

To reach the Denver Post editorial page by phone: 303-954-1331

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